Liam Fox is emphatically last week's, not this week's, news. Or so the government would have you believe. Downing Street has decided, not least in the wake of a new lurch to Labour in one of the polls, that it is time to draw a line under the former defence secretary's troubles. Officials duly spent much of yesterday attentively managing Westminster opinion towards that end. Sir Gus O'Donnell's report was not published until late in the day. There was no Commons statement by the prime minister. In the chamber, the new defence secretary bored for Britain on the Afghan war. And any attempt to broaden the debate into the influence of lobbyists generally was met with a dead bat.

But Mr Fox is still this week's story, whatever the government may wish. The attempt to divert public attention did not withstand a single minute of scrutiny of the O'Donnell report when it finally surfaced. The report is a devastating indictment of Mr Fox's style. Mr Fox did not just slip up a little, once or twice. He consistently and wilfully failed to live up to the standards that were expected of him. His conduct caused damage and could have caused a perception of conflict of interest. Faced with David Cameron's insistence that ministers had a "particular and historic responsibility" to be "different from what has gone before us", Mr Fox seemed to interpret these words as an invitation to ignore the rules, not uphold them.

This is really serious stuff. Hopefully, the O'Donnell report recommendations may tighten up the kind of abuses that Mr Fox's conduct exposed. But they are only a chapter in a much larger volume which needs to be written to regulate the effect of lobbying and vested interests in the political and governmental process. Here, though, there is only silence. Mr Cameron may once have warned that political lobbying and crony capitalism were the next big scandal. But any lingering impression of prime ministerial urgency on that score was undermined by a Downing Street decision earlier this week to kick the subject firmly into 2012-13 at the earliest.

In this context it is all the more striking that the justice minister, Jonathan Djanogly, should simultaneously have fanned the flames of special interest politics in another part of the forest. Mr Djanogly failed to declare that his teenage children are shareholders in his brother-in-law's claims management businesses. Since he himself was in charge of regulating the claims management business, this raised questions of potential conflict of interest. Sir Gus, in a separate report, says the matter has now been dealt with. That may be true in individual cases. But Britain's system of government is still in wide denial about the power of special interests.